


hidden in deep sedge and reeds

by oriflamme



Series: stand still stay silent [6]
Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Body Horror, Eye Trauma, F/M, No Hotakainen Is Neurotypical
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-29
Updated: 2019-08-29
Packaged: 2020-09-28 22:27:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,786
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20433470
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oriflamme/pseuds/oriflamme
Summary: Ensi is seven, and the world is a feral, lurking thing.And no one seems to pay attention when her father vomits in the ship's toilet. He chokes the sound back, but it's still loud on the hushed water.





	hidden in deep sedge and reeds

**Author's Note:**

> [ _my boy builds coffins for better or worse _](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeATvJpBpe4)
> 
> [ _some say its a blessing, some say its a curse_ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CeATvJpBpe4)

Ensi is seven, and the world is a feral, lurking thing.

And no one seems to pay attention when her father vomits in the ship's toilet. He chokes the sound back, but it's still loud on the hushed water.

But Saku is right, every time. When something hungry lurches up out of the water, its flesh swollen and distended with rotted tumors as it slaps against the deck, Ensi can draw her own conclusions. When no one else does, she goes to fetch Aunt Kaino.

(_She's not old enough to use a rifle, _Aino says, voice cracking, the muffled argument audible through the thin walls even when everyone knows to speak in whispers. Children shouldn't have to be taught to shoot or put blades through the brains of things that used to be people; they need to be kept safe. They're used to a softer, kinder world, and they still think that one day all will be well again.

Well. Aino does. Veeti's parents are more cynical about what they refer to as 'the ongoing, catastrophic collapse of society.')

The next time Saku curls up on the couch, his face sheet-white as the nausea takes hold, Ensi takes Veeti's rifle, marches outside while her cousin blinks, and shoots the beast before it can creep behind the life-jackets. She raises her chin and watches impassively as it writhes - to make sure it's all the way dead - until Uncle Eino yanks her back with a hoarse shout.

She's watched them load and aim a dozen times before. She can observe and figure it out for herself.

The recoil slams a deep, throbbing bruise into the meat of her arm and shoulder, though, and she trembles on the edge of the couch, shocky and numb. All around her the adults panic and scramble around the deck to figure out that the threat is already dealt with.

Her father folds his hands around her shaking fingers and pulls her into an awkward, sideways hug. It's the only way for him to wrap around her like a shield without the nausea crippling him. He untucks her hair from behind her ears and pats it over her eyes before resting his chin on her head, so she can't see even if something bursts through the door and rips into him. "My little Ensi-sukki," he mumbles as she burrows against him. "Shh. You're okay. You're safe."

She tries to feel the solidness of the well-worn couch, instead of the slithering things in the water below.

-

When she explains, they don't understand.

"Sweetie, your father gets a little queasy on boats, that's all. Always has," Aino tells her, her careful smile worried behind her mask as she smooths Ensi's hair out of her face. She's worried that Ensi is talking nonsense. Saku looks on. His hand on her back steadies her, but he doesn't speak often; he's too exhausted to join in.

He doesn't sleep well. Never has. Between that and the migraines and nausea that plague him by day, Saku is wan, undernourished, flinching at every rock of the waves. Seven years of intermittent sickness have made a wreck of his body. When her aunts and uncle and mother tell the story of those first days, the fact that Saku left the city and voluntarily came to the boat but still had to be dragged on board in tears, they seem to think that it's a funny anecdote to lighten the bleak mood of an overcast day. A comical overreaction.

Ensi understands. Her sleep is filled with the chaotic, nightmarish haze of distorted screams, too. But her father had no context for what he sensed in the city. The hungry, twisting death he felt crawling toward him through the streets, seeping in deeper with every exhale, collapsing under the weight of its own voracious mouths. The way the world ate itself alive. It probably felt like _he_ was dying, too.

Ensi has no context for a world without it.

So she nods, silent in the way she's been taught since birth, and the stubborn jut of her frown is quiet enough that the adults think the issue is resolved.

"Veeti was like that when he was younger, too," Aunt Tuuli jokes, bracingly. If she's not careful, her voice naturally falls on a register just a little louder than the rest of the Hotakainens. "His imaginary friend was named Teevi, remember? What was Ensi's - a little moose? They grow out of it so fast!"

"Moooom," Veeti complains, and so Ensi's claim that she and her father can sense rash creatures is set aside as the make believe, fantastical imaginings of an odd child. Saku presses her shoulder in reassurance and stands with wobbly legs to heat a tin of carefully rationed cocoa for her on the stovetop.

Ensi lets the sheaves of her hair fall forward around her face, her eyes bright, sharp shards, before she closes them and _listens_.

-

Uncle Eino and Aunt Tuuli teach her how to hold the hunting rifle so that it won't jolt as bad. She still bruises every time, even through the shoulder padding they stitch for her. But knives are quieter, less likely to attract more trolls in a swarm - when too many steak knives find their way first into the pockets of Ensi's jacket and then into the brain of the latest wriggling thing, she finally gets her own hunting knife.

She's faster than the cat, and more able to act on what she senses. Aino's arguments dwindle as Ensi mutely becomes the most efficient of the family in dispatching beasts, but take on a new tone, late in the night. The adults watch her now, and there's something wary in their worry that Ensi is not sure they're fully conscious of. When they catch themselves at it, they certainly act ashamed enough.

"How did you know, Ensi?" Uncle Eino asks her once, while she's wiping wolverine guts off on the snow.

Ensi merely blinks at him, silent. "You don't want to know," she reminds him.

His brow furrows in confusion as he strains to make the connection. It's not their fault, Ensi thinks. Not really. Eino and Tuuli were ready for the world to end.

Not for this.

-

There is no one to teach her mage work. Saku can barely keep his own head above water; he drowns a little more each night. Even when Ensi concentrates and begins to learn it for herself, her perception is just an extra edge on her senses. It's a bad feeling about pristine fields of snow; it's an intuition that a crate of preserved food is no longer safe to pry open. When she's particularly focused, she catches glimpses of the truth of the world - flickers of meat and teeth within compromised houses, transparent shapes swirling in the mists between the trees.

It cannot save everyone. But it can save some.

But to hear spirits more clearly is a danger of itself. Ensi doesn't realize out on the water, where the greatest danger tends to be the sealbeasts, mutated to be more open sores and maw than head, or the spindly, calcified trolls that dwell on the lakebed, their elongated spinal columns trailing through the water like grasping fins. Beasts elicit a pang of sympathy, perhaps, but they don't have words and are easy to dismiss.

The radio is the first clue. It has always been a particular bane to Aunt Tuuli. "There's nothing wrong with our equipment, or theirs," she explains, after another frustrating evening of attempting to contact one of the local settlements. Usually they're able to ping the others, but the black, crackling static of interference is particularly bad this week. And that is all it has ever been, even to Ensi - static. "A decade of triple-checking and replacing every part in the damn thing - but it affects everyone. Doesn't matter what frequency you use. S'why we're still not sure if there's even anyone alive over in Sweden. Too much damn interference."

Abruptly, a shriek of feedback emits from the speaker. Aunt Tuuli lunges to hit the power switch, cursing.

Ensi collapses.

A voice whispers to her, under the screaming choir of every dead thing still tied to the world.

[kan du høre mig?] 

[AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA -]

It's her father who races in at a dead run. The fastest they've ever seen Saku move, Aunt Kaino jokes, after the brush of terror has passed. He cradles her head as blood trickles from her ears and nose to stain her hair, curls around her in the corner, and hums some old song.

The blood that leaks down the back of her throat tastes of brine. But slowly, the noise that rings in her mind and not her ears ebbs like the tide, and there is only the salt of her father's tears on her face.

"Just an old pop song," he says later, helplessly. "God - I don't even remember the band. It's been years since I thought about it. How long has it been since we had internet?"

-

But what she has heard cannot be unheard. Once they know, that awareness never quite fades. They begin to turn rotting eyes toward her and whisper with intent.

Their pleas are genuine and false at the same time, and that is the worst part. They beg for death, but there is something wrong inside them. The same sickness that warps their bodies also twists their minds, leaving them hostile and horribly, horribly hungry - and once they realize someone can hear, their whispers turn subtle and sly. A mesmeric murmur, deep in the subconscious.

There is nothing to be done. Ensi steels her mind against the imploring sobs and trusts to what her eyes and nose and ears tell her. Intuition circumscribes her steps, but there is no true substitute for vigilance and cold steel.

(Their spirits wander afterward, adrift for as long as their lonely lives lead. She hasn't learned, yet, that they need to be shown the way.)

By the time she is sixteen, it is something unspoken among the Hotakainens and Hollolas. When you go on a supply run, Ensi goes, too.

-

It is Uncle Eino, Aunt Tuuli, and her father who keep them from settling down in any one place for the longest time. They maintain boltholes on uninhabited islands, to fall back on in times of need or when the boat sustains too much damage, but the village that comes closest to being their home base is Toivosaari. Founded in the second year, it is still plagued by the same setbacks, stumbles, and shortages as many of the isles of the southern reaches. They've begun to phase out the nets around most of the survivor communities, but the damage to the local fish population has been done.

Too often, word comes of another hidden beast nest disturbed on the island, that measures had to be taken to prevent an outbreak. When that happens, Uncle Eino shakes his head in quiet resignation, and steers the boat away for the season. They don't ask for the names of those lost. They don't get attached to anyone but family. "It's just not safe," they say, gently, and Ensi's mother spends the next few nights on the barbed-wire laced roof, staring out over the dark, damp forests and smoking cigarettes that trail away into the cold air.

But that's not sustainable. The world is a suffocating silence, and as much as they want to be self-sufficient, the Hotakainens are not alone in it.

So when word comes that another attempt to pasture animals on the nearby islands has failed, and Toivosaari won't be able to support its population through the winter without aid, they join the scavenging party that gathers out on the water.

There isn't safety in numbers. Not really. But there is a chance. The _Lumilintu _is one of the last motorized boats on the lakes, though, and as quiet as they've made it over the years the rowboats that Toivosaari fields are quieter still. Safer for a risky voyage such as this.

Ensi drops off the side of the Hotakainen ship and lands light as a cat, the thump of her boots on the wood seat almost silent. The gruff, burly man who reached up to help her down lets his arms drop with a grunt and a shrug as the rest of the Hotakainens help themselves. Aunt Kaino is the last, sitting on the edge and dropping down more carefully. "Same age as my boy," he comments, jerking his thumb at the prow of the boat.

Maybe he is. The kid sitting there resembles a tower of cats more than anything. With one wrapped over his hood and one tucked around his neck, all she can see of his face are the goggles strapped over a pair of taped-up glasses, peering at them. He raises a hand in a tiny greeting, the tips of his fingers barely visible under the wide edge of his sleeve; Ensi ignores it.

When he consults said cats and gives them a silent thumb's up, the fleet sets off into the lake channels that lead to Joensuu.

(With the guarded fortress of Olavinlinna under military control, Savonlinna is navigable - barely. The city itself is a choke point unless the waters are regularly purged of corpses after a warm, restless summer night. But Eino and Tuuli are chronically allergic to anything that has to do with the military, and the military in turn strictly enforces their claim on the resources there.)

Kiviselkä is fine. Enonvesi is fine. Pyyvesi is fine. The spray of the water as the low boat cuts through the water dampens Ensi's hair faster than the faint, drizzling mist in the air. Aunt Kaino has long since stopped offering to tie it back for her. The cats occasionally bristle and dig their claws into the boy's jacket as something passes underneath, but they skim over the surface of the water in silence.

Ensi has gone along to scavenge in small towns before. There's no way to avoid it, with the life they lead. But they've never gone this far east before. She sits at the back of the boat, wedged in beside Uncle Eino and the side, and as they approach Paasselkä he starts a low, quiet commentary. He hasn't had the opportunity to share his old, carefully hoarded tidbits about lake life in years - he used to paint boats for a living, and picked up plenty of silly stories and odd facts along the way. "Most of Saimaa was carved by glaciers. Not Paasselkä. It's a meteor crater, millions of years old. Almost 75 meters deep, and not a single island in the center. Used to hear stories about people imagining things over the water or the swamps nearby - Paasselän pirut. Weird lights, compasses going odd because of the magnetic anomaly. Craters tend to have them." He shifts in his seat with an awkward pause, as though waiting for Ensi to say anything. She has nothing to add. "We got the occasional radio broadcast from Varpasalo on the far side of it, those first few years. It was the only settlement that made it over here, but a fairly large one. Heard they wrote it off as a lost settlement a while back; no one's heard from them in too long. Guess we'll pass by at a distance, see if we can see anyone. Lord knows, radios aren't what they used to be."

When they paddle out over the open water - the deeps of Paasselkä, where the shallow shoals drop out from under them and the water stretches out in a wide, dark mirror - Ensi knows.

Her hand clamps on the side of the boat reflexively, before she's consciously aware of it. At the prow, the lookout cats and their boy are quiet, at ease. But Uncle Eino tenses. "What's wrong?" he asks, even less than a whisper.

(They don't put a name to what Ensi can do. But they heed it, no matter how Veeti rolls his eyes.)

Every part of Ensi tenses, strung taut as piano wire.

There is an abyss, below. Deeper than the physical crater could possibly be.

The waters are perfectly empty. No beasts or trolls dare come here. This is prime feeding ground for a lake giant of any size - nothing.

Her father stayed with the _Lumilintu, _back at Toivosaari. Thank the stars and any gods, her father stayed behind.

"Nothing. There's nothing." Ensi can't breathe. She can taste bloodbrine in the back of her throat, a taste of the nightmare sea. Like the boundary between the waking world and death has worn so very thin, here. "There's nothing."

Aunt Kaino glances back with a worried look and reaches back to squeeze Ensi's hand, tight enough to make thin bones creak. For once, Ensi is grateful for it.

The _nothing _nestled in the depths of Paasselkä lets them pass, with barely a ripple in its awareness. If it notices Ensi bobbing past, her head barely above water, it doesn't let on. But only because, Ensi thinks, Joensuu is waiting for them, a nail of death sunk deep into the fabric of the world.

Varpasalo is long dead: its water gates flattened, the shallows around it full of submerged barbed wire and trampled chain-link fences that failed along with the electricity. A broken tree by the waterside lays toppled at an angle, its branches dipping in the water, the jutting splinters of its trunk sticking out at an angle. There's still something massive impaled on the sharp prongs of wood - troll flesh doesn't tempt many scavengers. They turn their heads away.

Joensuu is blanketed in a sheet of snow, pristine and untouched. It crunches under Ensi's feet as she silently takes point for their group. The burly man shoots her a sharp look when she lets her filtration mask hang loose around her neck, but Ensi has long made peace with needing all of her senses on alert. She keeps her frown closed and impassive, focused on scanning the road ahead and the deep drifts on either side.

The moment passes without comment. She pulls up the dark grey and white hood of her hand-me-down coat, lets her hair fall forward, and marks the position of the cats after they bound down the boy's arm to walk alongside. Everyone spreads out, enough silent, unspoken space between them that the others will be clear if something erupts from under the snow.

Behind their face masks and goggles, the people she calls family look foreign, remote. The only difference between them and one of the military patrols on the bridge at Savonlinna is that their gear is less uniform, their patchwork armor assembled through trial and error over the past sixteen years. Aunt Kaino holds her rifle too close to her chest; Cousin Veeti has forgotten to pull his goggles down, his expression vaguely resentful as he scowls at the dull, flat grey buildings around them. The wind picks up for a moment over their heads, stirring veils of snow on the rooftops.

(They all wear heavy gloves, long coats, masks, tall boots, leather bracers - but those mean nothing against trolls that can snap arms like kindling and tear through muscle with horribly blunt teeth. The sterile test kit to confirm immunity won't filter its way through the lake system from distant Keuruu fully for another five years.)

It is always a peculiar sensation, watching adults at work in an old city. They always seem to have some strange familiarity with the way the streets are laid out, an instinct for where pharmacies and groceries and hardware stores can be found. Ensi has long memorized the names, the shape the buildings and warehouses take - Alepa, S-Market, Würth - but she's used to open water and small islands and the familiar confines of their home boat. Cities are just dead places, silent in winter and swarming with nests in summer. Kaino and Eino and the burly man put their heads together to hold a quick conference, arguing street names and orientation under their breath. They detour around a long-abandoned military roadblock and the landslide of wreckage that spilled out onto the road, and leave her and the boy on the street to keep watch as they canvass the place. The boy shuffles his feet in the crunching snow, huddled up and shivering in his coat as the remaining cat twines around his legs.

It's not clear. No city is. The buildings on either side are covered in dark, swollen vines of mutated flesh, with fresh, bulbous growths along them where the mass of merged bodies within must have recently consumed something. But Ensi can't hear anything particularly awake over the tuneless drone in her ears. Winter is the only time approaching a city like this is possible. In summer, it would be a roar.

They're not lucky.

Ensi feels the twinge in her skull half a second before the cat hisses. She draws her knife, yanks up her mask, and sets to work as the first crawling thing reaches around with distorted arms.

She kills two before the rifle goes off. Ensi freezes in place, processing, and raises her head to see the boy standing there just as frozen. His cat wrestles with something alive in the snow, howling and hissing in fits.

He shot over her head.

The sluggish, dripping thing slowly slipping down the side of the building to reach for her falls in sloppy pieces, splattering the snow with purple-tinged viscera. [But I was so quiet. . .[quiet]] it protests, trailing off.

She returns the favor by throwing her knife. It impales the beast crawling up the wall behind him; the blade sticks in its soft skull.

"Tapsa," the boy says, faintly. He's still clutching his rifle like he's surprised it went and shot without his permission.

Ah. Ensi strides past him to retrieve her knife. The tip is broken where it struck the wall. "Ensi," she says, wiping it off on her sleeve. The coat is a lost cause already.

They need to leave. All of them. Everything in earshot is stirring, the drone rising to a head-aching groan.

"Yep yep. Time to go," Tapsa says, as one of the buildings down the street begins to rumble and unfold. He pats his lap and his cat leaps up onto his shoulder, licking its claws clean.

He is a good friend.

-

(Paasselkä allows them to leave.

That is, Ensi thinks, the least terrifying way to phrase it.

Ensi can't shake the feeling she's being watched as they glide over the dark water.

[I can see you, little swimmer.])

-

The year she turns twenty, they stop at Toivosaari's new dock after the full two weeks quarantine. Uncle Eino and Aunt Tuuli grumble, because the quarantine procedures are now enforced by locals and military. But they go very quiet when they're allowed to administer the test to their blood samples, and all three - Aino, Kaino, and Eino - and Aunt Tuuli watch their samples writhe and putrefy in glass tubes.

Immunity is a recessive trait. As fraternal twins, Aino and Kaino each had a chance. But no.

"Well. Now we know," Uncle Eino says, with a heavy, tired expression. His hair is greying fast, these days.

Afterward, for the first time in twenty years, Saku willingly staggers down the gangway and stands at the end of the dock. "_Land_," he says, vehemently, and promptly faceplants in the grass alongside the path up to the village.

He refuses to leave again. Nothing - not love or food or the useless paper money they still stash in their bugout bags - will get him back on the _Lumilintu_. And so the Hotakainens put down their stakes on Toivosaari. They've participated in enough salvage runs for the isle that their credit is good, and the village needs more people to achieve a permanent, stable population. Uncle Eino and Tuuli receive a Hollola homestead, too, but they pick a plot closer to the water and start prepping to leave again at a moment's notice. No one forgets that Toivosaari's water gate and established quarantine and fully cleansed status are all new, shaky things.

The two story house they raise with the village's help, with its little porch and wide windows and separate bedrooms, is almost as foreign to Ensi as tales of apartment complexes and suburbs. The grass and saplings out front are young and fresh, the soil still blackened in places from the controlled burn a year ago. Moss creeps over the rocks, damp with spring rain. Aino unpacks trunks full of old, carefully mothballed blankets from the storage of the _Lumilintu _and weeps as she wraps one around Saku and hugs him from behind. She starts a vegetable patch within days, smudged with dirt and beaming as she ropes Kaino and Ensi into helping her while Saku convalesces, nausea-free for the first time in two decades. Veeti already has a sweetheart here - somehow, it survived all the intermittent years of contact. He moves in with her family further down the slope. Their new neighbors walk by almost every day, checking in, offering gifts, eager to converse.

So many people - it's overwhelming. Ensi becomes aware for the first time that people can be just as terribly _present _when they're alive as when they're dead. Her long, watchful silences and cool demeanor stick out here like sore thumbs.

When winter comes again, Ensi straps on her rifle, tucks her knife into her belt, and walks down to the dock to join the perimeter patrol. Tapsa falls in half a step behind her, almost like an afterthought, whistling as he strokes the tabby on his shoulder.

-

Ensi is 25 when she's the one who doesn't come home at winter's end.

It's always a risk. Things formalize slowly, year by year. In the mixed ranks of the village's troll hunters and guards and cleansers who sweep the forests and swamps and lakes around Toivosaari, Ensi is one of the first who might be called a scout. She and Tapsa walk the old, overgrown duckboards of the marshy swamps, his cats trotting ahead and behind - but it's Ensi's observations that Tapsa marks down on their maps. Even the impossible ones. The slumbering beasts she detects off the assigned path, the trolls that she signals without setting foot in a cottage.

"I have eyes and can see," he says good-naturedly, tapping his lenses. "D'you know your eyes flash when you do that thing?"

(They don't. Not in a way most people can see. Tapsa's intuition isn't strong enough to call magic, but he's sensible about the omens he sees in crackling firelight, the way his cats obey him in a way cats wouldn't normally.)

So when the skalds question the validity of the reports, Ensi merely shrugs, silent. Tapsa just hums, amused. They're thorough, and more importantly, they're right.

(It will be another decade yet before Keuruu formalizes mage units. Their efforts help exorcise the airwaves at last; Sweden scoffs when their operators make first contact with poor, backwards Finland, where even the military believes in magic.

Saimaa is more practical about these things. Survival is what matters. Uncle Eino takes up boat painting again, drawing cats and prayers to Vellamo along the sides for those who seek safe passage.)

When the call goes out for a wider-ranging expedition that winter, seeking scouts - 'mage' is still not spoken - to assist one of the villages in the far north of Saimaa with reconnaissance of a nearby seclusion zone, Ensi signs on for a change of pace. Tapsa doesn't.

That's good, Ensi thinks, as she pelts headlong across the bridge. He didn't need to die, too. On the bridge, any step could hit ice instead of snow, but the rash beasts that emerged from the deep water in a rush are not slow on land as seals are. She can't afford to stop.

Of the two greater land beasts that plague Finland, the moose and the bear are the most deadly.

Moose do not form herds. There must have been a nest nearby, and the clever beasts swam under the surface to reach them. They're two meters tall at the shoulder and swollen to more than 700 kilograms with excess limbs, their long, hollow heads full of oozing sores and pockets of extra teeth as they crush Anca and half the boats to pulp under splayed hooves. Ensi can still hear gunfire behind her, but no shouts.

There's forest ahead of her, if she can reach it. She can lose the moose loping after her more easily there than in the town behind, where the gunfire will be drawing down worse on their heads. She almost makes it.

But the hooves thunder behind her, too close. This one was at least three moose once; it bulls the cars aside with terrible force, knocking them clear over the edge into the river below. Ensi dodges once, darting to the side of the bridge as it brings shovel-sized hooves down, and aims with her heart.

Intuition is good for only one head. The beast wheels around to charge her once more, and Ensi knows that she's going to die.

One hand still clutching her rifle, she lets herself fall back over the side of the bridge. She raises the other hand - stupidly - as the beast plummets after her, and thinks, **_No_**_._

The spirit that floods _through _her is a translucent, glassy green-blue. It surges up and hits the beast with pulverizing force, snapping every too-long neck and shoving the moose away with a twist of its own antlers.

The moose that is her luonto canters away along the bridge and vanishes into the trees as Ensi hits the water.

It goes to fetch the only help it can find.

-

She hits with a sharp shock, and begins to drown. The water is too dark and cold, and when Ensi kicks blindly she can't find any point of reference. She could be upside down in the water, for all she knows. Red eyes and slithering bodies surround her, all her childhood nightmares coursing through the water as they block out any sky above. Hands find her, and Ensi lashes out on instinct. Instinct here is a bright slap of ice-blue light - but she is weak, her luonto expended.

"These waters are too dangerous to swim," the man says to her, gently, as he draws her up onto dry land. There are stars overhead, in this space between dreams and death, and for the first time in her life Ensi realizes that there can be more to dreams than brackish, screaming water.

There can also be a man in rich green and brown clothing, a grey pelt draped over his cowl and shoulders, whose eyes are so pale a hazel that they gleam gold in the unearthly light of the sea. His face is broad and soft and terrifyingly kind. When Ensi shoves and snarls, scrambling away to vomit bloodbrine onto the rocks of his safe space, he sits back on his heels and folds his hands together to wait.

-

The man who hauls her out of the river carries her to safety, away from the sounds of the fight and the stirring hivemind of the city in the distance.

But Ukko-Pekka is not a man of Saimaa. He only knows the safety of his own home. He carries her north and east, into the deeper, more rugged forests of Karelia.

The ones who survive the attack are not stupid. They return to Toivosaari, with the usual tidings of a terrible world.

-

Two cracked ribs and muscle-deep bruises along her back would not ordinarily be enough to keep Ensi from leaving. But when she wakes up a week later, swaddled in a nest of what appears to be every fur Ukko-Pekka owns, her ankle is also broken. It will be six weeks before she can trust her weight on it, if not longer.

Her luonto has not returned, either. The fatigue runs deep, in a way she's never experienced before.

It is...incredibly irritating.

While Ensi endures the most vexing week of her life, Ukko-Pekka treats her with care. At some point, he must have splinted her ankle. Now that she's awake and in a fine temper, he shies around her, leaving offerings of soup and snowmelt water in shallow bowls at the edge of her space. He smiles a small, hesitant smile when she snaps at him. He frets and putters around the far side of the room while she drifts in and out, and in the morning offers her a fresh tunic and pants that have clearly been cut down and hastily reworked.

They hang off her like Tapsa's old coat. Ensi grew up willowy. But they're better than her own stained things, dry and yet still reeking of Saimaa water. After burying his face in his hands, Ukko-Pekka finds her a belt.

He doesn't touch her. Ensi sits up, probably before it's really wise; he hesitates and hovers, until she jerks her head in a terse nod and he helps prop her up against the wall. When she grits her teeth and forces herself to limp around the room far too soon, he passes her his walking staff and proceeds to look on with mournful resignation.

-

He also doesn't speak Finnish. He doesn't speak at all, in the waking world. When Ensi tries to ask questions, he can only watch her, quizzical and apologetic.

-

In dreams, he's still apologetic. Here, she can walk without issue, so she paces the boundaries of the first land she's ever seen in this place. It's barely more than a strip of rocky shore, with a single pine tree that stretches up into the vanishing mists above. The brackish, ink-black water of the dream sea eddies around the edge of the rocks, shallow and placid.

"But we understand each other now," Ensi says, emphatically. Her patience is thin here, too. "How are you even here?"

"I am not sure where I came from," he says, hands loose on his lap. "Further north, perhaps. I was separated from my family when I was very young, and became lost. I belong to the forest, now." He rubs the back of his head, the close-cropped hair a fine brown. "When you speak, I don't understand the words. I don't think we know the same language. Or perhaps it has been too long since I spoke with someone living, and I have…forgotten. I'm sorry."

Mostly, he seems concerned by the fact that Ensi has no safe place of her own in dreams. Ensi has never been lucid enough to walk the sea, before; her only brief, jagged impressions are of dark water, and of teeth. "My mother taught me to think of a warm, sunny place when I was afraid in the night. Of a beach with pine trees." Ukko-Pekka glances around, and sighs. "I am _sure _she said pine. Quite positive. But if you have drifted in the water so long…I fear you should have been consumed by the voices. You are a mystery."

The answer arrives a few days later. Ensi spots it first: a distant, lumbering ripple in the water. Her luonto paddles to the edge of the shallows with determined strokes and then shakes itself, water flying from its palmate antlers. When a quick-jawed dead thing lunges out of the water to snap at its heels, the moose perfunctorily kicks it in the head. Then the moose snorts and butts its nose against Ensi's chest.

Ensi pats the side of its neck with a thump that feels oddly familiar. Dreams can be a tricky business, but she remembers now - her hair drifting through the water, her head heavy as her luonto tirelessly ferried her through the sea.

Something bright radiates in her chest, warming her once more.

-

He lives in a damn tree.

Ensi fails to process this at first, being somewhat distracted by the fact that she has been rescued by a weird foreign mage. It is February by the time she can limp without excruciating pain - not that it stops her - but she touches the curved, rippling wall of Ukko-Pekka's single room, and realizes that it is sandpapered wood. When she storms outside to check, the deep snow has been tamped flat in the clearing. The tree itself splits wide, the roots half wrapped around a cracked boulder to reach the earth again on the far side. It's negative eight degrees, and Ukko-Pekka hurries after her in a mild panic.

Apparently, it was just 'like that when he got here.'

Once she has limited mobility back, he takes to walking the snow-hushed woods at midday, when the winter sun is highest. Ensi takes her rifle apart and puts it back together to make sure it's in working order. He returns covered in a light layer of snow, a brace of trapped rabbits in hand, and spends much of the evening whittling by the battered, ancient wood burning stove.

It occurs to Ensi fairly early on that somewhere under the small avalanche of furs, she's sleeping on the only bed. This culminates when she snaps and starts flinging pelts at Ukko-Pekka's head, exasperated by the language barrier, and he accepts them with a bemused smile. He continues to slowly nod off in the upholstered chair every night, and new furs continue to mysteriously join the pile by Ensi's feet in the morning.

It's irritatingly effective.

-

March comes too quickly; the snow thaws in fits and starts, renewed by the occasional storm, but by the start of April Ensi knows the trip back to Saimaa will have to wait for the summer heat to pass. The region between here and the lakes is uncharted; Ukko-Pekka keeps no maps. If she's going to make it back, she needs a better feel for what she's dealing with.

Ensi starts to join him on his daily patrol, once her ankle fades to a twinge. Her mood improves marginally once she's moving. The deeper into the forest they go, the less fretful Ukko-Pekka becomes about her leg; his expression grows distant, abstract, as they walk under trees that seem…too large. Wide enough around that the hollow in the tree he's made his home no longer seems implausible. Craggy, moss-covered boulders tower, taller than a man, and uninfected deer dart along the blocky cliffs over deep, green gorges. Lynx lounge on fallen trunks and low branches, and there is a lone, uninfected female bear whose territory Ukko-Pekka gives a wide, respectful berth. Ensi carries her rifle, and Ukko-Pekka's staff never leaves his hand, but they can go days without encountering a grossling.

"I belong to the forest," Ukko-Pekka says, simply, when she asks him in dreams. Her perception is keener than his - when they do need to run an infected deer to ground, Ensi reacts first, always - but he has sunk a great deal of power into the land here, in a way that makes Ensi strain to understand.

Perhaps it is still some of her family's skepticism, ingrained in a way she never thought around. Not magic - a preternaturally honed intuition. An extra sensitivity and bad dreams, on her father's side. _Psychic_, if Aunt Kaino felt a little daring.

But she has always known better. The shapes she's used to catching in the mists over Saimaa are different here, in the clear air: the spectral afterimage of birds chasing their counterparts in the trees; an extra shine reflected in the creek water when a herd of deer walks through. The fire in the stove curls and coils, and sometimes Ensi thinks it fans wings. The more she studies them, and the more time she spends lucid in dreams, the clearer they become.

Meanwhile, Ukko-Pekka lays a hand on the side of an impossibly broad tree, rests his forehead on the trunk, and a sheaf of bark the size of a man slides off in his hand, exposing the paler wood beneath.

Because he asked nicely.

When he has enough, he lashes what he has to a sledge and prepares to descend. He hesitates in the doorway as Ensi pulls on her gloves to join him.

He ranges further afield with the sledge, and Ensi better understands how he wound up so close to Saimaa in the first place. They reach flatter lands that used to be fields, now overgrown and gone to seed to the point that the grasses obscure the shape of the scattered houses.

Ukko-Pekka stops at the first house that makes Ensi's skin prickle with unease. When they kill the family of three that have sown their mutated corpses into the walls, Ukko-Pekka gently gathers what he can and sets to work sawing and hammering the bark into small, square coffins. He pulls up his collar and draws the fabric of his cowl over his mouth and nose as he works.

"Most of them don't need much, anymore. They've been trapped long enough that the relief sends them along," he explains, as they sprawl out on the rocks and stare up at the lights shifting in the dreaming night. "Some used to be more particular - they won't rest until they lie in grounds consecrated to their standards. I do not know all the old rites. But now it is enough to be buried, or burned, and shown the way. To have someone say goodbye."

(He does not really talk often, even in dreams. He answers Ensi when she asks questions, even if his answer is sometimes only a helpless shrug, and then asks her questions in turn.

But most nights pass in silence. Ensi concentrates, and tries to envision safe ground of her own, so that when she returns to Saimaa she will not be left adrift, her resolute luonto her only haven.

Ukko-Pekka folds his hands over his chest and watches the stars, and sometimes her, his unsmiling expression sad and fond.)

-

As summer cools and autumn begins to crisp the leaves, Ensi grows restless.

Ukko-Pekka cannot miss it. He starts folding up pairs of socks in bundled furs and laying aside strips of dried meat and summer roots. Ensi scrubs her old gear down one last time in the stream and hangs it up to dry outside, checking the straps and the ammunition scavenged from farmhouses one last time.

When the stack Ukko-Pekka is making starts to get too tall, Ensi puts her foot down. "I'm not taking all your things. Are you stupid? There's food in the forest, berries on the ground, and I'll sleep wherever I need," she snaps, crankily.

Ukko-Pekka smiles with an incomprehension that is just a touch too knowing. All the more reason for Ensi to leave; he's getting wise to her ways. But when Ensi steps outside, judging the chill in the autumn air and deeming it good enough, the bundle he offers her is more reasonable. She shrugs on the fur lined cloak from the top of the pile and laces it up, and finds that he has at last pieced together something that is not a tent on her. He walks with her to the edge of his usual reach, still with a faint, lopsided smile, and waves earnestly as Ensi crosses stepping rocks in the fast-moving river to keep walking.

Ensi stops barely half a kilometer out, and curses herself for a fool. She stalks back up the forest path, muttering, and loosens the knot holding her cloak closed as she strides back into the house.

-

The next time she leaves, she brings her husband with her.

-

(It would be faster to cut south sooner than they do. But that would take them past Joensuu, over Paasselkä's deep waters.

Even circling around to the west, the first night that Ensi lets her luonto ferry her across the water to her new dream space, the whispers seem to susurrate far below.

[I can see you still, little swimmer.])

-

Word reaches Toivosaari ahead of them, as Ensi and Ukko-Pekka wait through quarantine.

Her mother's face is hollow, devastated, and for the first time in Ensi's life she thinks Aino Hotakainen looks truly older. A sob escapes her as Ensi rows the boat through the water gate and pushes her hair back out of her face. Her mother runs down to tackle her in a hug, hard enough that Ensi sways back with a grunt, and Ukko-Pekka (who finds boats _highly _dubious) manages to hop onto the dock without assistance.

Her father jogs down as well, but slows to a stop a few paces short. He stares up at Ukko-Pekka, and blinks. "Uh, hello?" Saku ventures.

Ukko-Pekka offers a hesitant smile.

"This is my husband. I found him in the woods," Ensi says, as she pats her mother briskly on top of the head. To get it over with as efficiently as possible.

That never actually works.

-

"Oh, honey," her mother says. She hasn't stopped weeping since they made it through the swarming village square to get home. "You - I don't understand. You disappeared, and you - got _married_? Without any of us there?"

Uncle Eino pats Aino's shoulder in sympathy.

Since Saku just blinks and continues to stare at Ukko-Pekka without a word, Aunt Tuuli jabs a finger at Ukko-Pekka with a narrow squint. "So! You think you're good enough for our Ensi, eh?" she drawls, as Ukko-Pekka politely studies the living room. "Eh, weird forest man?!"

"He doesn't speak Finnish," Ensi says, having mercy on them.

"Oh, _honey_," Aino sobs.

Uncle Eino adjusts his glasses, peering closer at Ukko-Pekka's face. "I mean, not Russian, probably. Maybe. Thought that the last we heard, they tried nuking themselves."

While they sort things out, Aunt Kaino just smiles and shakes her head.

-

Ensi's odd, mute husband goes over surprisingly well with everyone else. For some reason, the other villagers seem to think that vanishing into a fairy tale forest for a year and coming back home with a fey spirit for a spouse is, in fact, entirely in keeping with Ensi's burgeoning reputation as a mage. They are entirely too enthused; somehow Ensi finds herself charged with picking the location for their new home as a couple.

She picks one of the cliffside plots, secluded. Ukko-Pekka considers the map of the village and agrees with a small nod. It's the only way Ensi thinks they're going to get any peace.

Tapsa jokes over cups of hot root tea, but when she meets him in the village square that first day he hugs her so hard it makes her bones ache. "Kicked myself. I should've been out there with you," he says, and there's a shadow of grief in his face as he tries to smile and take a sip at the same time. Grief apparently inspired him to grow out a mustache. Very unfortunate.

Then his face collapses into a relieved smile. "But you've brought home a husband! Finally!" he cheers, clapping her on the back.

Ensi arches a brow. "Something I missed?" she asks, dryly.

Again, that shadow of old trauma crosses Tapsa's face. "Ensi, our parents have been trying to marry us for ten years." When Ensi snorts, long and loud, Tapsa throws up his hands. The cat wrapped around his neck today yawns in protest. "Your Aunt Tuuli is _terrifying. _You know this, right?! I had to stand up to her last year and tell her to stop treating me like - like meat!"

"I had no idea," Ensi says, blandly. "Absolutely none. Oh no." She pauses to raise her tea to her lips, and then adds, "Man flesh."

Tapsa sets his tea down with a slosh. "You are not my best friend anymore. You are the _worst_." He cups a hand around his mouth and shouts, "Ilmari! Ilmari, you are my new best friend!"

Ilmari stops midstep on the far side of the square. He glances from side to side, bewildered.

Ensi swallows and meditatively swirls her tea in front of her face. "Nonsense. Ilmari knows his place," she says.

"Yes ma'am," Ilmari says, automatically. Then he makes a break for it.

Tapsa groans and lets his head thump against the table.

-

Thirteen years pass too quickly. Their home is small, with a sauna in the trees.

She's still not entirely sure how Ukko-Pekka managed to cart so many furs here.

In the back of her mind, Ensi hesitates. Ukko-Pekka is not immune; it is standard to test everyone who becomes a resident, now, even with the military presence easing off. Aunt Kaino never married, for the same reason. Genetics testing used to be more precise, but all the elder Hotakainens know is that they're not immune while Saku, Veeti, and Ensi are. For Kaino the risk of passing that on was never worth the flip of the coin.

These days, though, when Ensi walks out to scout, Ukko-Pekka walks with her. Tapsa keeps dragging Ilmari along with a long-suffering expression, as if to prove a point. Saimaa is a different land than he's used to, but Ukko-Pekka starts to walk the isle where they pasture sheep and farm the same slow, careful way.

When Ensi begins to extend her own power, her spells are only a last resort - hasty, wordless improvisation. As her focus matures, she calls on the wind to redirect cloud cover. When she closes her hand into a fist with a cry, an unlit explosive bursts into ice-blue flame under the belly of the giant that barreled through the cleanser unit in Savonlinna.

The lieutenant who witnesses it is very clear-headed. He's also very pale as he shakes Ensi's hand and asks her to come back to Keuruu, to speak to the unit chief.

Perhaps she could speed things along. But Ensi's not interested. Keuruu drums up a corps of twenty-five mages attached to the scouts and cleansers by the end of the decade, anyway.

(Hilja is the one who started writing up old, long-form runo. The kind you'd hear in old tales, or from the Kalevala, with fanciful appeals to the origins of things, to old gods. Ensi was never much fussed with formality, but Hilja enjoys it. She can chatter about it endlessly when she stops by the house to test her latest bark tea brew on Ukko-Pekka and Ensi; it's one of the few subjects other than flowers that bring Hilja out of her shy shell.

Some of them are quite catchy.)

But while the world is still a terrible place, hedged in by barbed wire and sharp bone, Toivosaari is a quiet, safe harbor.

One couldn't hurt, Ensi thinks. Ukko-Pekka, visiting her dream space for the night, buries his face in her hair so that she can't see his expression when she asks.

In the end, Ensi's almost thirty-eight when she has a traditional sauna birth, like her mother before her. Her mother and Hilja let her nearly break their hands. Ukko-Pekka is busy having a minor emotional breakdown outside with Tapsa.

"Oh dear," Hilja says, ominously. Then - "Oh_ dear_," a second time.

"Oh dear _what_?" Ensi demands, voice cracking.

Twins run in the family. Jukka and Juha are identical in a way Aino and Kaino aren't, with Ensi's cheekbones and Ukko-Pekka's square jaw. It skipped Ensi's generation, but the pattern is obvious.

"I still blame you for this," Ensi informs Ukko-Pekka, exhausted, while the entire extended Hotakainen and Hollola family coo and fuss.

Ukko-Pekka squeezes her hand, and with his infinite wisdom and patience fetches her more tea.

-

They come so close to happiness.

It's hard to remain vigilant a whole life through. It's easy to forget that the underbelly of the world is so easy to slice open, spilling blood into the water for anything to taste.

-

Ensi is sixty when Jukka and Juha marry. Tapsa always joked through the years that the twins did everything together, and says as much as he solemnly presents each twin and his wife with a wedding cat.

(From the sly smiles the twins exchange when they think no one is looking, they've been plotting this moment possibly since they were five. They're friendly and outgoing and fit right in - but they have a streak of Ensi's dry humor in them.)

Only Saku and Aunt Kaino live long enough to see it. But the eldest Hotakainens die peaceful and quiet one at a time, at home in their beds. The _Lumilintu _retired a long time ago; soon, it is only a family heirloom that Juha inherits when Veeti's daughter chooses a military career in Keuruu instead.

Onni is born only a few years later. He's a serious, solemn child, and the only person who can make him laugh is his grandfather. Ukko-Pekka sets him on his shoulders and allows Onni to steer him by the hair around the isle, humming with a long-disused voice as they trek through the trees. They go down by the cleansed creek and Ukko-Pekka drapes his old bear-fur hood over Onni, so he can growl and pretend to be ferocious.

One day, when Ensi walks down to retrieve them for lunch, she catches them bent over a young, green sprout by the edge of the creek. Both of their foreheads are covered in sap, and even as Ensi approaches, Ukko-Pekka gestures, palm up, guiding the tree shoot as it sprouts up in a coil of hardening bark and budding leaves.

-

She is 68 when Ukko-Pekka does not come home again.

He has gone back once every few years, to the mountainous forests where he first sunk root. Ensi went with him a handful of those times, after the children were grown.

She notices when he begins to stare toward the east at odd hours, with a faint, uncertain frown. But when she asks that night, Ukko-Pekka only shakes his head and holds her close, resting his chin on her head as he stares out at the dream sea.

He leaves a few months later at the start of winter, and does not come back in the spring.

She chooses to believe he would have come back, if he could have. If he were alive to do it.

(Intuition sends a shiver through her, when she considers traveling back to Karelia to try to find the tree again. She wants to remember the clearing as it was.

When she dreams and calls for him, her voice echoes in the silence at the edge of the sedge and reeds and misty water of her space.)

But something inside her withers the following winter, as it sinks in. Hilja invites her over more often; Tapsa and Ilmari try to include themselves on her scouting runs again, but she declines. She almost misses it when Onni begins to have nightmares; Juha has to call her back from a scouting run in tears, and she spends the next few years teaching her grandson how to stay lucid in dreams.

Onni understands perfectly for a child his age that his grandfather is not coming back. His solemn nature is touched by fear, now that he can hear the voices of the dead world, and Ensi does not know how to soothe him. She has more sympathy now for her poor parents, attempting to deal with a child who is a strange new person, different in ways that you fail to account for ahead of time.

When she calls Onni to her side, to leave the island and learn to scout in the wild, he flinches away with wide eyes.

Too harsh, too terse. She's learned to be better, after a long life with her friends and family. But there is a new sharp, brittle edge inside her chest that cuts into her as well as them when she breathes. Ukko-Pekka would have been better with Onni: unflinchingly kind, even as he walked the untamed forest without a mask. _Was _better with Onni; Ensi smiled and helped rub away the tree sap before sweet Anne-Mari could see, but Ukko-Pekka could already tell Onni had inherited something else from his grandparents.

She will never see him again.

-

Anne-Mari and Tuulikki both delay a little, after Onni is born non-immune. But Tuuri arrives, perky and adventurous and far too curious for her own good.

Two years later, Lalli is born.

He is too much like Ensi. It's like looking at a subtle mirror. Ensi distilled, concentrated, raw. She was a quiet child; Lalli is silent until he's almost five years old. He doesn't cry, but he doesn't smile, either. He dodges touch, hisses when irritated, and observes everything with bright, too-clear eyes. When he needs something, he doesn't say anything - he goes to his mother, or to Onni, and waits for them to intuit what is wrong. His sensitivity to the world is Ensi's, intensified on every possible scale.

And still, Ensi is not right for him. Lalli accompanies her out on the lake, obedient, his affect blank even as he curiously pokes around the boat, and when she snaps at him he cuts off any reaction with a blink.

She needs to be better. She can't remember how. The absence of her parents and Ukko-Pekka, who made sure Jukka and Juha grew up okay - helping her, in spite of her - is an open wound.

-

She's glad they didn't live to see Toivosaari die in a breath.

They deserved that happiness.

But the world is a terrible place.

-

Ensi is seventy nine when it catches up to her, and drags her down into the drowning abyss.

She's been lost since she looked Hilja in the eye. Or maybe she's been lost since they went to the east, and she dared to think the heart of the kade let them go. Somewhere, her body is swaying while her mind is absent, the blood from the only eye she managed to gouge out trickling down her face. Here, deep in the screaming subconscious of the world, something is twining around her spinal cord in a cold rush, and her vision is steadily going dark.

No one is going to survive this.

"No," Ensi says, a muffled gurgle of sound, the last of her air. She raises a hand that shakes like she's twenty years older, black-veined and pale, and reaches.

The luonto that flows through her refracts like sunlight, golden green and ice blue. The branches of its hooves and legs sprout anew with every stride as it pours upward through the water, blooming with leaves and flowers, and anything that tries to intercept it burns.

Then the jaws of a deeper horror close around Ensi, and swallow, and there is no light at all.

**Author's Note:**

> [ _happiness hit her like a bullet in the back_ ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iWOyfLBYtuU)


End file.
